Graph Database Tutorial

Well, “identifiers” aren’t much of an “operation”, but there are some operations related to identifiers, thus the title.

All first-class objects in a graph database typically have a unique identifier. This means nodes have unique identifiers, and for those graph databases that represent edges as distinct objects (see previous discussion on the pros and cons), they have unique identifiers, too.

This means we can ask a node for their identifier, remember the identifier, and later find the node again by looking it up in the graph database. In InfoGrid, this looks as follows:

MeshObject someNode = ...; // some MeshObject aka Node

MeshObjectIdentifier id = someNode.getIdentifier();

and later we can do this:

MeshBase mb = ...; // some MeshBase

MeshObject nodeFoundAgain = mb.findMeshObjectByIdentifier( id );

As you can see, InfoGrid uses an abstract data type called MeshObjectIdentifier, which you can think of as String for a second. (see below.) In InfoGrid, all identifiers are long-lasting. This means, your object will still have the same MeshObjectIdentifier after you rebooted your database. This has some advantages, e.g. you can define well-known objects in your graph database to which you can easily return even weeks later.

Other graph databases may use different data types as identifiers (e.g. int or long), but the use of identifiers is common with the above operations. They may or may not be the same after rebooting of the database.

Why does the type of identifier matter? Well, it depends on the application you have in mind. For InfoGrid applications, we primarily care about web applications, specifically REST-ful web applications. And so InfoGrid web applications generally use MeshObjectIdentifiers that identical to the URLs of the application. Let’s make an example:

Assume you have a URL bookmarking application which runs at http://example.com/. Let’s say a user creates tag “books”, which can be found at URL http://example.com/books/. It would be most straightforward to create a MeshObject with MeshObjectIdentifier http://example.com/books/. Which is exactly what InfoGrid does by default. No impedance mismatch between URLs that the user sees, the objects in the application layer, and the database! This leads to dramatic simplification of development and debugging.